[codeslinger]

I don't want to sound like an ass or ungrateful or anything, but the FSF needs to wise up. People won't switch until the alternative is a lot better than what they currently have. Why would a normal person care about the file format of an attachment? Hell, how many people even know the format of the files they are working with? (I mean the extensions, not the file layout or anything) They just care about being able to open it. They have a raft of better shit to be doing and that's how it should be.

tl;dr: Make OpenOffice 10x better than Office and you won't have to cajole people to switch. Don't do that and we'll ignore you like we've been doing.

[mootothemax]

Exactly. Right now OpenOffice is good, but it needs to be so much better; based on past experience, I don't trust that a document created in OO won't look like crap when opened in Word. The reverse happens often enough to be a concern.

Oh, and please don't bring out the "fix it yourself" argument; enough time has passed, OO should be better already.

[whalesalad]

This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. For those of us who live in caves, this works, but for those of us who participate in the real world, it doesn't. It's like a hippie telling me to only buy locally grown organic produce and boycot the rest, when it's cheaper and I really don't give a shit.

You're completely right. The alternatives are garbage. OpenOffice is an absolute joke. My dad sent me this attachment, asking for some help doing an animation. Let's compare the OpenOffice version, to the Keynote version.

Keynote: http://grab.by/3r23 OpenOffice: http://grab.by/3r25

Until the app that I use to deal with these open formats is equivalent or better than MS Office or Keynote, I'm going to use it. I could care less what format the document comes in... I've never had an issue opening something. I worked out the issue my dad had in Keynote (the slide he needed help with was not the screenshot, heh)

The FSF guys have never provided alternative solutions that actually work, and yes, until then, I'm going to ignore their stupid bullshit.

[mootothemax]

You know what's even more annoying? The pool of talented developers working on two office suites for Linux! So, rather than everybody working on an MS Office killer, we have crappy OpenOffice and an even craffier KOffice both competing against each other for the title of who's crappiest. Grr!

[jrockway]

Yeah, the world would be a much better place if everyone did exactly what I told them to.

For me, anyway...

[mootothemax]

Heh, sometimes I think that the only thing OSS really needs for mainstream success is a dictator ;)

[qw]

The most annoying part is that their functionality is tightly woven in with the rest of their application. Why would we need separate Word/Excel parsers? Couldn't you just separate common functionality to a shared library...

It's the GIMP problem all over again. If they would just separate each functionality into components, it would make it easier for others to create "shells".

I see potential for a lot of improvement in the GIMP and Photoshop interfaces, and someone with better design skills than me could potentially make a Photoshop-killer.

[jrockway]

I think what people don't realize is that stuff like OO.org is just for show. The free software people don't use WYSIWYG slideshow generators or word processors; they already have tools that are much easier to use.

It's the rest of the world that refuses to use any model better than Powerpoint or Word, and they get exactly what they deserve -- a tedious way to make poor-looking presentations and documents.

[loup-vaillant]

I'm not sure I follow you here. Do you mean Power point and Word are not fit for their purposes? And, what "better model" are you speaking of?

[jrockway]

LaTeX, Beamer, etc., etc.

[anatoly]

LaTeX is not much easier to use than Word; it's incredibly more difficult to use. It requires you to remember or look up a bewildering number of strange-looking commands, a special syntax, etc.

[loup-vaillant]

LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step. The fact that you do not see what you get requires you to think a bit more abstractly. It is also less discoverable.

Once you get past that point (and I agree most people won't), I doubt you have to remember more things in LaTeX than in Word. I one case, it's special sequences of characters, while in the other, it's menus.

Also, this wasn't really about ease of use. The TeX back-end is definitely better than Word's or OOO's, and that fact ends some arguments. A well integrated WYSIWYG on top of that would be great, though.

[mrkschan]

You can find out the reason why OpenOffice does not work really well from Sun CEO - http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/good-artis...

[loup-vaillant]

Apparently, most of you only value short term convenience (If you did, you would use open format as much as you could, even if it means worse current software). No wonder the world is build on exponential growth and depletion of limited resources.

EDIT: Please someone tells me where I am wrong. I don't care about downmods, but I do care about being corrected, or else I stay wrong.

[rimantas]

  Please someone tells me where I am wrong

1) You assume that using proprietary formats is only short term value. Why do you think it is?

2) You assume, that everyone going with open formats would improve software. Why should it happen, exactly? I honestly tried various versions of OpenOffice at least a dozen of times and gave up. I have no hope it can get rid of that Frankensteiny feel.

And I have no idea, why and how average office worker (who spends most of the time working with those documents) should know the difference between proprietary and open formats and which is which. In most cases format question will boil down to "this is garbled" and "this looks fine".

[loup-vaillant]

(1) It's about freedom. It's the control of your data. The absence of vendor lock-in. We are more vulnerable when we are entrenched in a proprietary model. In the long run, it will be things like cloud computing, semantic analysis of your output, and even outright spying. Things are already pretty bad right now, and will be worse over time if we don't fight that lucrative model.

(2) In the case of popular software, where a popular alternative already exist, I do (although even if I am wrong, (1) is way more important). Also, I suspect you can't use OpenOffice because you are used to word. My brother, who is not so used to Word, actually prefer OpenOffice. It is a bit like 3DsMax vs Blender. I know no one who learned one first and liked the other.

Now, it should be clear why a non-tech person should be able to tell proprietary format from free ones: it is about a very basic, universal concept: freedom. So they'd better learn the necessary technical skills before they lose their freedom.

This has happened before. When most people didn't know how to read, those who did had a tremendous edge. They could access more ideas, and therefore have more choice, more freedom. The printing press magnified this effect, and ultimately lead to the generalization of democracy in the western world. The catch is, you have to learn to read before you benefit that. And until you do, you will have a hard time to see the need.

[_sh]

Who's this 'we'? I already use Open Office and, for my needs, it is already 10x better than the alternative used at work. Better because (in Writer) bulleted lists are consistent, and it's easier to manage styles.

Having said that, I'll probably not reject your email attachment, instead I'll just make my edits and send it back to you as an Open Document.

As a side note, why do so many people assume everyone else is a stereotype? When people are complaining about their specific needs, all I hear is "All people want to do is...", and "I don't care about XYZ, it should 'just work' the specific way I want it to because that's all people want", and my all-time favourite, "Joe Six-pack just wants XYZ". I've never met anybody with the surname "Six-pack".

[dschobel]

I think OP's generalization that most average technology users don't care one iota about the openness of their tech so long as it 'works' is dead on.

Have you honestly had a different experience with non-expert users?

[ZeroGravitas]

Yes I have a different experience, the non-expert users I deal with struggle on with systems that clearly don't 'work' either by ignorance of alternatives or worse because they are locked-in.

This is probably in part because they keep choosing systems that aren't "open" and then having their short-term stupidity exploited. Which is understandable, as they're not claiming to be technology experts.

Look at all the complaints in this thread: "I'm worried my documents won't look right in the convicted monopolist's de-facto standard office app with it's closed, undocumented, virus propogating, privacy leaking, and generally frankly atrocious memory dump-based .doc file format. And it's all OpenOffice's fault so don't bother promoting open and documented file formats, hippy!"

[mootothemax]

Why isn't "I'm worried my documents won't look right" a legitimate concern? You're talking about something that has a very real effect on people's lives and you're trying to dismiss it because Microsoft Office exists.

Word definitely has problems of its own, but dismissing concerns about how a document will look to the other 90% of people out there is missing the point.

[ZeroGravitas]

It's an entirely legitimate concern. But the fault that causes this worry is fundamentally a lack of openess. The solution is to promote openness. To be exact, if the document format was open then there wouldn't be a problem, or at least many orders of magnitude less of a problem.

End users shouldn't have to worry about this because the techies should have figured it out for them. Not only have we failed, there's a bunch of comments here that show that we (techies, as a class) don't even understand the problem.

[bruceboughton]

By the same token, one could ask why the FSF always assume anyone cares about their militant brand of open source.

[loup-vaillant]

Maybe because they made what we call "Linux" possible in the first place? (In case you don't remember, GNU pre-dates Linux. The kernel was just the last missing part.)

[qw]

What about BSD? There are alternatives out there that doesn't require GNU.

[loup-vaillant]

Besides the kernel, BSD systems aren't entirely GNU free. (They use at least gcc.) You could change the kernel, but replacing GNU is harder. When LLVM and the related projects are ready, that will be another story.

[bruceboughton]

Sorry s/anyone/everyone/

[flogic]

I give "Joe Six-Pack" arguments some credence since sometimes I am Joe Six-Pack. In term of Open Office that's usually, I don't care why the formatting is bungled I just want to be able to read copy and paste my specs.